Site Mobile Navigation

Posts tagged with GLOBAL WARMING

Thousands of inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs gathered in a suburban Washington convention center on Monday for the annual three-day meeting of Arpa-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy. It wasn’t quite the Oscars. At the registration desk, attendees received a goody bag that included a report on clean energy from the Pew Charitable Trusts and a refrigerator magnet that showed the periodic table of the elements.

Photo

Credit ARPA-E

But the breakout sessions held true to Arpa-E’s tradition: there were lots of swing-for-the-fence ideas. These included finding a high-efficiency, low-cost way to turn surplus natural gas into liquid fuel for cars and trucks, and identifying something to burn other than hydrocarbons so that carbon dioxide is not one of the byproducts.

One researcher proposed burning aluminum instead. One challenge is that the ashes, or oxidized metal, would be hard to recycle back into aluminum without big releases of carbon dioxide.Read more…

A field of cereals burning near the town of Voronezh, Russia, after weeks of searingheat and virtually no rain in the summer of 2010.Credit Associated Press

As has often been noted here on the Green blog, one of the biggest uncertainties humanity faces regarding climate change is the potential effect on the world’s food supply.

If there is a risk that global warming and related changes could hit much sooner and much harder than scientists are expecting, agriculture could be the crucial realm where that occurs. In fact, we have already entered an era of sharply higher global food prices, with climate change as one of the likely causal factors.

A new paper from researchers associated with Tufts University puts the overall risk in perspective. It is billed as a working paper, meaning it has not gone through formal scientific review, but it strikes me as worth highlighting nevertheless. The findings pretty closely match the conclusions presented in some of my reporting from 2011.

The authors, Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton, point out that in the 1990s, research suggested that climate change would be fairly benign for agriculture. The first few degrees of warming would help agriculture expand in chilly regions, the thinking went, and the rising level of atmospheric carbon dioxide would act as plant fertilizer, increasing crop yields. More recent science has cast sharp doubt on some of those conclusions. Read more…

NEW DELHI – Once more, frustration with stymied efforts on climate change has emerged as a major theme at an international conference on the planet’s health. Opening the 13th annual Delhi Sustainable Development Summit conference this week, India’s prime minister noted that similar sentiments surfaced last year at the United Nations Rio+20 meeting, which marked the two-decade anniversary of a landmark Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Rio+20 was a “poignant reminder that the ambitious goals that we had set for ourselves”” are “far from being realized,’’ Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told the heads of state, government ministers and delegates gathered here on Wednesday.

Photo

Credit Delhi Sustainable Development Summit

In a panel discussion on the theme ‘’Defining the Future We Want,’’ Jean Charest, a former premier of Quebec, suggested that states, cities and provinces are now addressing climate change in ways that many national leaders are not. Maybe heads of state and national legislatures can be ”embarrassed into action by other levels of government,” he said.Read more…

One of the most sobering realities of climate change is that even if all greenhouse gas emissions came to an abrupt halt tomorrow, climbing temperatures, rising seas and extreme weather would still be in the global forecast for perhaps hundreds of years because of the carbon dioxide already released into the atmosphere.

To get some perspective, the story of the ozone hole over Antarctica illustrates how even a relatively small perturbation in the atmosphere can have wide-reaching and long-lasting consequences.

International action was taken within just two years of the discovery of the patch of thinning ozone in 1985 to put an end to the release of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs — an organic compound that was used in refrigerants and aerosols and is the main culprit in ozone depletion. But scientists are still discovering the rippling effects of that CFC pollution decades later.

Two papers published online on Thursday in the journal Science highlight how the hole in the ozone layer, which is beginning to recover because of limits imposed on CFCs, is influencing major wind patterns, ocean circulation, concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere and even rainfall in the Amazon.Read more…

A cyclist in Beijing, where air pollution was registered at "hazardous" levels on Tuesday.Credit Reuters

Dense smog shrouds eastern China for the second time in about two weeks, forcing airlines to cancel flights and factories to shut down temporarily. Meanwhile, nearly 32,000 heed an online call by a real estate tycoon to declare their support for adoption of a clean air act. [Associated Press, Wall Street Journal]

The government of British Columbia approves cullings of the barred owl in a last-ditch effort to save its endangered cousin, the less aggressive northern spotted owl. [The Canadian Press]

The massive amounts of heat produced by cities may be heating up rural areas 1,000 miles away by as much as 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, researchers report in a new study. [National Geographic]

Scientists say they have succeeded in boring down into Lake Whillans, a body of water buried about half a mile under the West Antarctic ice sheet, and retrieved samples with tools and sensors. It is the first time researchers have taken clean whole samples from a subglacial lake in the Antarctic. The water and sediment are now being processed to better understand subglacial microbial life, climate history and today’s ice sheet dynamics. [The New York Times, Wissard]

Alessio Rovere, a Columbia University researcher, examined an ancient shoreline deposit in Cape Agulhas, South Africa. Dunes moving inland ahead of a rising sea are believed to have buried trees at the site, with the decaying trunks producing the unusual features at center.Credit Justin Gillis/The New York Times

In my article in Tuesday’s Science Times about the risks of long-term sea level rise, and in an accompanying podcast, I reported on the link between past instances of global warming, caused by natural fluctuations in the climate, and higher shorelines.

Based on a study of these past variations, some scientists believe that even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, we would be due for a substantial rise in sea levels over the long term as ice sheets slowly respond to the warmer temperatures brought on by the greenhouse gases that humans have already dumped into the atmosphere.

The paleoclimate record, as it is known, suggests that even a slight amount of global warming can produce a rise of 25 to 30 feet. And if scientists are anywhere close to right in their projections, the warming over the coming century due to human activity is going to be more than slight. That means a long-term rise in sea level of as much as 80 feet cannot be ruled out. Read more…

Earlier flowering times: the progression of Cypripedium acaule, the pink lady slipper orchid, on April 23, May 7 and May 20, 2010. Credit Zoe Panchen

Henry David Thoreau was a peculiar fellow. After his secluded stint at Walden Pond, his fixation with the natural world only grew. Starting in 1852, his journal turned into a two million-word project documenting seasonal observations around his small Massachusetts township, Concord. Over the next six springs he could be seen racing about town like a madman in an effort to spot and record that year’s first elusive blooms, all the while taking notes.

“Thoreau was sort of crazed, traveling near and far across Concord to find the earliest flowering species, many of which can no longer be found in the area,” said Charles Davis, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University. “We don’t ultimately know why he was gathering this data.”

Until relatively recently, many critics dismissed Thoreau’s work as amateurish. Today, however, he is respected not only for his contribution to literature and philosophy but also for his work as a naturalist.

Most recently, his data made their way into the journal PLoS One, where researchers used those early observations to plot 160 years of ecological change. In 2010 and 2012, which saw record-breaking spring temperatures, plants responded accordingly, they found, with dozens of species in the eastern United States flowering at the earliest times in recorded history.

“It was hard not to notice in 2012 that things were different,” Dr. Davis, a co-author on the paper, said. “For me, one of the telling stories was walking around Cambridge and Boston and seeing the Irises in bloom in late 2011 and early 2012 — it was totally bizarre.”Read more…

Bird watchers and environmental advocates demand an explanation for the Army Corps of Engineers’ recent bulldozing of 43 acres of wetlands and woodlands in the Sepulveda Basin in Los Angeles that had been full of trees, bushes and wildlife. [KABC]

An interactive map allows you to view a fever line of temperature changes over the last 20 years on any spot on the planet, with drop-down menus for earlier periods. [NewScientist]

Americans may be buying more compact fluorescent light bulbs these days, but they are less likely to set their thermostats low during the winter than they were four years ago and have less confidence that their actions will help to curb global warming, according to a new survey.

The survey, published this week, also suggests that doubt is growing that even widespread concerted action can make a difference when it comes to climate change.

Sixty percent said energy-saving habits could help curb climate change if they were adopted by most Americans, down from 78 percent in 2008; those who say they believe that warming can be slowed by changes in personal habits across the industrialized world dropped to 70 percent from 85 percent over the same period.Read more…

For those who might be keeping score, we just passed the 333rd consecutive month of global temperatures above the 20th-century average.

November 2012 was the fifth-warmest November since records began in 1880, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in its monthly climate report. The agency calculated that the 10 warmest Novembers on record have all occurred within the past 12 years.

The last time global temperatures came in below the 20th-century average for the month of November was in 1976, and the last time any month came in below the average was February 1985.Read more…

Some Green readers have probably heard by now that a draft of the next big United Nations report on climate change has leaked.

Science@NASA

The agent of the leak is a rather colorful climate contrarian named Alec Rawls, who essentially claimed, on the basis of a single sentence in the draft, that the entire edifice of climate science is about to collapse. In his interpretation, the group putting the report together, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is about to acknowledge the validity of a longstanding fringe theory: that cosmic rays have a huge influence on the earth’s climate.

This claim turns out to be an overstatement, to say the least. But first, what do the leak and the accompanying flurry of reaction on blogs tell us about the United Nations exercise of periodically summarizing climate science?

These reports come out roughly every five years. They are unlike anything else in science that I know of: an attempt to digest the many thousands of relevant papers and discern a global scientific consensus about the state of climate science, the likely impacts of climate change, and the policies that might be effective in countering the risks.

The exercise is a special type of response to a unique global problem. Ultimately, the reports are supposed to help governments decide what steps to take to act on their own stated commitment under a global treaty to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic,” or human, “interference with the climate system.”Read more…

The future of Antarctica on a warming planet has long been one of the great uncertainties in climate science.

The western part of that continent has a low-lying ice sheet that appears to be highly vulnerable to attack by warmer ocean water. Some signs suggest that the ice sheet is in the early stages of a collapse that could eventually have a profound effect on sea level.

The much larger, higher, colder ice sheet in eastern Antarctica is another story. Scientists have long thought that not only might it be stable in a warmer world, but it might even gain ice, as some computerized forecasts suggested. The idea was that a warmer atmosphere holding more moisture would lead to greater snowfall, but eastern Antarctica would still be cold enough to preserve that snow as glacial ice.

Some research even suggested that the gain might be enough to offset much of the water pouring into the ocean from melting ice elsewhere, helping to limit the rise in sea level.

Matthew Cavanaugh for The New York TimesA lone skier on an artificially snow-covered run at Mount Snow in West Dover, Vt., last December.

Snow can be an entrancing sight or an exhausting burden, but for communities dependent on winter sports, it is one thing above all else: revenue.

In recent years, however, the cold cash that used to fall from the sky, giving an economic lift to 38 states, has become less reliable. Winters are getting warmer, less snow is falling, and snow seasons are starting later and ending earlier.

According to the research, which focused on data from 1999 to 2010 and was conducted by researchers at the University of New Hampshire, the downhill ski industry takes in about $1 billion less revenue in a poor snow season than it does in a good one. A bad snow year subtracts anywhere from 13,000 to 27,000 jobs.

Projections by climate scientists indicate that winter temperatures could rise by anywhere from 4 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, and the length of the snow season in the Northeast could be cut in half.Read more…

This year Arctic sea ice reached a historic low, breaking a record set in 2007 by a whopping 18 percent. Researchers suggest that the ice could disappear entirely in as little as two or three decades. That would accelerate the warming of the planet, given that dark solar-energy-absorbing ocean water would replace a surface of bright white ice, which reflects sunlight back into space.

Air traffic is the biggest source of pollution in the Arctic. Ever since cross-polar flights became commonplace in the late 1990s, flights crossing the Arctic Circle have risen steadily, surpassing 50,000 in 2010.

While cross-polar flights account for only a tiny percent of total global emissions from aviation, the standard cruising altitude for commercial planes in the Arctic is the stratosphere, an extremely stable layer of the atmosphere. Black carbon and other emissions get trapped in this layer and as a result remain in the atmosphere longer, causing far more damage than emissions from flights at lower latitudes, scientists say.

But with some creative detours, airlines can buy a little more time for Arctic sea ice, a new study suggests.Read more…

Josh Haner/The New York TimesA warming climate creates summertime water stress for trees like these mountain pines in Montana, making them more vulnerable to attack by beetles. The gray trees above died several years ago.

One of the great scientific tasks of the day is to understand how and why trees die. It may seem like a question that would have been answered many decades ago, but it was not — at least not at a detailed physiological level. Now, amid growing signs worldwide that forests are at risk as the climate changes, scientists are trying to catch up to events.

Lately, more and more evidence is pointing toward a mechanism known as hydraulic failure as the culprit in many large-scale forest die-backs. This occurs when drought reduces the flow of water into tree roots. The trees take measures to limit the loss of water through their leaves, but trees need water flowing through them as much as humans need blood. Eventually, if the drought is bad enough, the tiny tubes that carry water up the trunk of the plant can fill with air bubbles.

Detailed understanding of this mechanism may still be developing, but anybody who has forgotten to water a house plant has seen the consequences. The flow of water through the body of the plant is interrupted, and unless moisture is restored to the soil, it can droop and eventually die.

Now comes a surprising new paper from an international research team presenting ominous findings about the risks to forests from global warming and its accompanying water stress.Read more…

About

How are climate change, scarcer resources, population growth and other challenges reshaping society? From science to business to politics to living, our reporters track the high-stakes pursuit of a greener globe in a dialogue with experts and readers.